


Rainbows that Shine on Spilled Gasoline

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-16 01:51:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean has a hell of a past and a future he never expected. In his experience, people from the past turning up is usually a bad thing, but sometimes it's the best kind of surprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rainbows that Shine on Spilled Gasoline

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elanurel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanurel/gifts).



> For [](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/profile)[**elanurel**](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/)'s prompt "And will you take me as I am/ this bloodshot blue midnight like a tattoo on my skin?" in [](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_hetexchange/profile)[**spn_hetexchange**](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_hetexchange/). Prompt and title from Jeffrey Foucault's "Appeline."

The realities of Dean's life were ordinary enough--had to be at least a million guys around forty with a kid they don't see enough and a marginally not-crappy place to live with nobody in it to come home to. Of course, most of them hadn't died more times than they'd celebrated birthdays, hadn't been to heaven and hell, or held on to the edge, white-knuckled, trying to stop the world from ending. Last few years, Dean had been working on finding his balance between those two worlds, one foot in each, angle shifting all the time. The weekend before, Amy had let him have Kayla most of the day, and he was nothing but a normal guy, shaking the sawdust out of his boots as he chased her around the tot lot at the city park, holding her warm weight against his chest as he carried her back to the car.

Other weekends he rolled on down the highway, following a lead Bobby sent his way or meeting up with Sam. This weekend was a solo job, an easy one, getting rid of a pair of ghosts haunting an old amusement park before the summer season cranked back up again. The drive felt good, asphalt under his tires, trees and hills sliding past the windows mile after mile, all the way to Colorado. If he smiled sometimes when he caught sight of Kayla's car seat in back, well, that was okay too. More spirits he took care of, the safer the world would be for her. Amy didn't understand, but Dean couldn't really hold that against her, shit being what it was.

Dean didn't even bother getting a motel room, just headed straight to the amusement park. He dug one of his FBI badges out of the glove box and thought for a moment about the days when he and Sam got called out for being too young to be federal agents. The bits of gray threaded through his hair said that was long past, gone and never to be seen again. Dean shrugged on a shoulder holster and a suit jacket and tucked a weapon into the holster.

Dry grass and gravel crunched under his feet as he walked across the lot, and he fingered the EMF detector in his pocket. The new one was a splurge--looked like a cell phone, and it could vibrate silently or squeal out its signal into an earbud. He hadn't built it himself, but he found a dude who could and commissioned it with the bonus he got for leading his crew on a project that got done early, safe and under budget. Another thing that surprised Dean about his life--turned out he was good at something other than fighting and running and putting shit in the ground. Who knew?

The gadget buzzed hard against his hand when he walked around the rusting tilt-a-whirl, and he was glad for the silence of it when he heard footsteps coming up behind him. He turned around and nodded at the short, scrawny guy in worn jeans and an oil-splotched chambray shirt. "Afternoon."

"What can I do for you?" The man's voice sounded like he spent his days gargling the gravel of the lot he worked on. "We're closed for the season."

"I'm aware of that." Dean pulled out his badge, flipped it open and closed casually. "Agent Harrison, investigating some area disappearances."

The man shook his head, mouth turned down in annoyance. "The lady agent already talked to me, and I still don't know nothing."

"The lady agent?" Dean hoped like hell the real FBI wasn't on this case, too. Not that they could do a damn thing about it. "I'm sorry, I just wanted to check on a few things myself."

"Seems to me that Agent DiFranco was looking in the same place as you. Goddamned government, head don't know what the tail's doing."

Dean cocked an eyebrow, wondered if he was the head or the tail in this situation. "Ah, well, I apologize for that, Mr.--uh."

"Sparks. Earl Sparks. I heard from Cathy at the county records office that the lady agent was nosing around down there, so I guess you're going to follow behind her and do the same damn thing. Typical."

"I guess I am." Dean flashed a tense smile and turned around, heading back to the car. Agent DiFranco, huh? Dean figured he might as well find that records office, see if this was real FBI. If it was, he'd head out of town, try again another weekend before late winter warmed up into spring, but he had a feeling that Agent DiFranco hadn't been any closer to training in Quantico than he had.

So he drove to the county records office and waited until he saw her walk out. She fit the part, that was sure--slim build, long hair pulled back in a neat twist, dark pantsuit over low-heeled boots. In the afternoon light, he couldn't see her face well enough to tell if she was 25 or 50, but she walked briskly, bag tight at her side. Then she looked around the lot and ducked behind a delivery van to let herself into a small SUV, ten years old and worn around the wheel wells but solid. Not the kind of car a fed would drive--not a fleet car, not a rental. "Agent DiFranco" his ass.

One thing Dean didn't need, even on a straightforward case like this ghost, was an amateur running around, getting herself in trouble. He thought about going up to her right there, warning her off, but making a scene in the parking lot of a government building was never a great idea. He waited until she pulled out of her parking spot and then followed, keeping her dented Colorado license plate just in view. When she pulled into the parking lot of a Denny's, Dean drove past, circled around behind the building and parked out of view of the diner's windows.

As he walked into the diner, he spotted her sitting in a booth, a paper file with a small tablet computer sitting on top of it next to her open menu. He slid onto the seat opposite her, and when she looked up her eyes went wide and sharp for a second before she shut her face down--flat, professional. Maybe not so much of an amateur, Dean thought, and something about her face pinged in his brain as familiar. Big eyes in a thin face, faint lines around her eyes and mouth making her look like she was around his age, but the echo in his head looked younger, fresher. Twenty-something.

Dean tried to place the memory, but he'd met a whole shitload of a lot of people during his life, and he'd fucked a lot of women during his twenties. A _lot_ of women. He wished he could say that he remembered many of their names. Now this woman was watching him, waiting with the kind of patience that could drive Dean nuts. Dean screwed on his game face and dove in.

"So, Agent DiFranco, I hear you're investigating some disappearances over at the amusement park."

She rolled her eyes and put her laminated menu down with a slap. "You know damn well I'm not a federal agent any more than you're a park ranger named Cole."

Dean blinked, tried to grasp at the flashes of memory. He remembered the Samuel Cole ID, one he'd put together while Sam had been at Stanford, six hundred fucking years ago. It'd been lost or destroyed or confiscated somewhere along the way, and he hadn't used a name like that in a long damn time.

"It's okay if you don't remember me, Dean. I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of people in the last ten, fifteen years, but you're the one who got me into this life." She lifted her eyebrows and smirked. "Not that you meant to, I'm sure. You were just trying to help me save my brother from a Wendigo."

Dean sat back against the duct-tape-patched vinyl of the booth. "Haley? Uh, Collins?"

"That's me."

"Damn it, you're a hunter? You were supposed to--"

"Go back to my safe little life while other people never knew what happened to their brothers and sisters and children?" She shook her head once, hard. "Couldn't do it. I tried, but this life kept pulling me back in."

"It's like that sometimes." Dean's voice was quiet, and he looked at her, saw the years on her face, a hint of the things she'd seen.

"I heard about you, sometimes. You know, people talk. Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, the ongoing telenovela of the apocalypse that never happened."

Dean forced out a laugh past the hurt that was always wrapped up with the memory of those years. "We got lucky."

"I don't imagine that everything I heard could possibly be true, but the fact is I haven't heard anything about you in years." She looked down at the menu, shrugged her thin shoulders. "Figured something finally got the better of you."

"Oh, many things. Many, many things. Not the least of them my daughter."

Haley's eyes went wide again, a hint of blush creeping onto her cheeks. "You're _married_?"

"Naw, still single as they come. But I have a day job, and most of the time I stay in one place. For Kayla."

"Wow. So, Dean Winchester, weekend warrior?"

Dean cringed, but it was hard to deny that the shoe fit, more and more these days. "Guess so. Still get the job done when I need to."

"I'm sure you do." She gave him a look, and Dean smiled in return. Dean Winchester had flirted with women in forty-eight states, plus Mexico, Canada and fucking Scotland. He knew that look.

"What do you say we give up on this _incredibly_ slow diner and go find a bar? Spirit's not going to get anybody else before tomorrow, and I don't know about you but all this talk of old times makes me want to get some whiskey inside of me."

She looked over at her file for a long moment and then glanced back at Dean, biting a little at her lower lip. "I saw a dive a couple miles down the road, next to the motel I'm checked into. You want to follow me?"

"Absolutely." Dean slid his ass back out of the booth and stood up.

"You still have that amazing car?"

"Of course." Reality was, Dean wasn't sure how much longer he could keep taking the Impala on road trips, but he was looking into some radical retrofitting options. He wasn't ready to give her up.

"Seriously? It must be bionic by now." She stood up and stuffed her file and computer in her bag before leaving a couple dollars on the table. " _We can rebuild it._ "

"Oh, I have. I have."

The drive was short, and Dean followed much more closely now that he wasn't trying to be stealthy. In the bar, he bought a bottle from the bartender and got a couple glasses of water to go with the pair of heavy-bottom tumblers. He found Haley in another booth, this time waxy polished wood instead of cracked vinyl, and poured a couple fingers for both of them.

They talked about her brothers--both married, both busy raising her nieces and nephews who she didn't see often enough. They talked about Kayla and her mom, and the inevitable fact that she and Dean couldn't make it work. Dean mentioned Sam, just enough to let her know that he was still out there hunting, that he was okay. She never asked about his dad, and seeing her kept tossing Dean's head back to that year when he was following Dad's intel around the country, wanting nothing more than to find him. That year, when he thought that getting his family back to something solid was still a possibility.

Dean swallowed down a shot of whiskey in his father's memory, and then he drank half a glass of water to try to shove that memory down out of his throat.

"You okay there?" Haley was watching him over the rim of her glass--her second to Dean's fourth.

"Yeah, just thinking, you know?"

"I know."

Dean poured himself another shot, but when he put it to his mouth it didn't taste good anymore. Age was fucking with his tolerance--for the liquor, the travel, all of it. He had no idea how his father had managed it for so long. When he put his glass down, Haley reached across the table and touched his hand. It had been a while, and the contact lit up nerves all through Dean's body. He turned his hand to loosely hold hers, his thumb rubbing a circle over the tender center of her palm. "What do you think about getting out of here?"

"I think my room's just across two parking lots."

Dean left the rest of the bottle as tip, and they walked out the door together. Darkness had fallen while they talked, and the cool air in his lungs woke Dean up, shocked him into the present and blew away the haze of history he'd felt clinging to him. He'd survived his past; he was alive and, with any luck, about to get laid. Life could be a hell of a lot worse.

Haley's room was like thousands Dean had been in over the years--marginally clean, bland, one queen bed with its headboard bolted to the wall. Haley slipped out of her suit jacket, and her blouse underneath was sleeveless, revealing arms that were slim but cut with muscle near her shoulders. Below the elbows, her arms had the remnants of a tan, faint lines from old scratches etched pale.

She reached for the hem of her blouse and then paused. "You planning on just watching or what?"

"Hey, I thought you might not want to be distracted from watching the show yourself." Dean gestured at himself, and smiled as she rolled her eyes. He shrugged out of his jacket then and started unbuttoning his shirt. "Yes ma'am, getting undressed, ma'am."

He shrugged out of his button-down and crossed his arms to pull off his t-shirt, dropping both of them onto the cheap fiberboard dresser. He had his hands on his fly, just popping the button with his thumb, when he felt her hand on his chest. He looked up and saw her gaze intently as she traced the lines of his tattoo with the tip of one finger. "I heard a story about this," she said.

"Don't tell me you read those books."

"Yeah, right." She traced the continuous line of the pentagram and then moved on to the undulating line of the flames. "No, I've heard some tales about the Winchester brothers being marked. Some say by angels, some say demons."

Dean unzipped his pants so that they hung on his hips and then took her hand, drawing it away from the tattoo. "It's a little bit of both, if you want the truth, but the ink was all human. Tattoo parlor in Toledo."

She put her hands on his hips and shoved his pants and boxers down to pool around his feet and then whispered, "shit," as she stared at the scar on his shoulder. The handprint had faded some over the years, the lines not so sharp, but there was no hiding what it was. "I assume this is one of those other things, not so human?"

"It's old news, that's all." Dean put his hands at Haley's waist and tugged her blouse up over her head. A swirling line of ink peeked up just past her waistband, and he pushed her pants down past her slim hips to reveal some kind of knotwork set in a circle, red and black ink stark against the pale skin of her belly. "I take it this isn't recreational either?"

"Protection. Or something. The woman who put it there called it a shield, and I guess we could all use one of those."

"True enough." Dean dropped to his knees and touched his lips to the ink. He could feel the lines of it where her skin was slightly thicker, and he traced it with his tongue, his eyes closed to see the shape of it in his head. She sighed above him, and he wrapped his hands around her hips, fingers on the curve of her ass, and moved his attention to the thatch of short hair between her legs. His nose filled with the smell of her, and he followed with his tongue.

His mouth filled with her taste, earthy and warm, and as he went to work with his tongue and lips he thought about the lines of her tattoo--swirling, looping, around and around and in. He could hear her breathing above him, noisy inhales through her nose and exhales with a trace of a moan. Her body started to tremble in his grasp, and he opened his eyes to see her palming the wall with one hand, strong fingers extended, grasping with fingertips against the textured wallpaper.

He made his tongue firm and flicked it faster, faster until her legs shook and she sighed, her free hand coming to rest on the top of his head, nudging him away. Dean kept his hold on her hips until she felt steady, and then he rose to stand, kicking his way out of his pants and boxers. His cock was heavy and hard, bobbing in front of his belly, and just the glancing touch of it against her thigh was too much to deal with and not nearly enough to get him there.

Twenty years ago he would've been coming against her leg with a wash of shame and satisfaction, but if he'd learned anything in his life it was how to hold on, how to hold and wait. Her cheeks and chest were flushed pink, and he put his hands on her chest, palms cupping the small curves of her breasts. He brushed his thumbs lightly over her nipples, and she closed her eyes again, arching her back into the touch.

"You planning to fuck me sometime soon?" she asked, her voice breathy and spent.

"Right about now work for you?"

She tugged her feet out of the tangle of her pants and underwear, ducked down to grab something out of her bag and nudged Dean backward until they were both next to the bed. Dean sat down and scooted backward, his cock an awkward weight between his knees. She somehow managed to be graceful as she climbed over him, all wiry limbs, dark hair hanging down in her face. Dean moved to flip her over to her back, but she slung one leg over his hips and settled down with her ass on his thighs, his cock rising up between them.

"Oh yeah?" Dean reached out and put his hands loosely around her waist.

"Oh yeah." She opened her hand to reveal a condom packet and then ripped it open and smoothed it down over him. Dean bit his lip against the almost-right touch of her hand around him, and she grinned in response. She knelt up and moved a few inches closer, then took his cock in her hand again and lowered herself down. He felt swallowed by heat and pressure, and he let his hands slip down to hold on to her hips instead, his thumbs sitting in the dip above her hip bones.

She started to move then, and the wiry muscles in her thighs flexed as she rode him. Dean could feel himself getting close, sweat gathering in his hair, his breath catching in his chest as his hips rose up to meet hers, and he moved one hand lower on her belly. He pushed his thumb against her clit and moved with her rhythm. He wanted her to come again before he did, so he kept his eyes open, watched her toss her head back, strands of sweaty hair clinging to her cheeks, watched her breasts bounce just a little on her narrow chest.

When he saw her stomach muscles clench, when he felt her pussy fluttering tight around him, he let himself go. He closed his eyes and held her hips tight, thrusting hard up, up, as her ass bounced on his thighs and the darkness behind his eyes splintered and he came. He panted into the warm air of the room and shook under the bracketing weight of her hips. When he went limp, his whole body feeling soft and spent, she rolled down onto the bed next to him. Dean rallied himself to pull off the condom and clumsily tie it off before dropping it down on the floor.

He dropped back onto the welcoming softness of the crappy mattress and as he dropped off to sleep he felt Haley's head on his chest, her hand rubbing idly at the lumpy scar on his shoulder.

~~~

Dean woke to a a ray of sunlight poking through the gap between the motel drapes like some kind of seriously inconvenient laser. He felt the scratchy fabric of a polyester comforter wrapped around him, and when he rolled over the space next to him was empty. He sat up and saw in a glance that the bathroom door was open, the light in there off, and Haley's bags were missing from the room. His clothes were folded on top of the dresser, and a cup of coffee sat on the bedside table, a piece of paper underneath it.

Dean twisted around to sit on the side of the bed and took the piece of paper, holding the still-hot coffee in his hand. A ten-digit phone number, Colorado area code, and one sentence. _You take this ghost, the next one is mine._ He folded up the paper and drank down a slug of the coffee, letting it wash away the traces of her taste from his tongue.


End file.
